The Army honored a fallen hero of the Ft. Hood Jihad Massacre with a medal this week. Not, of course, that the Army describes the November 2009 attack in such meaningful terms. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan may have shouted "Allahu Akbar"; (Arabic for "Allah is great") as he killed 14 and wounded more than two dozen; may have been in contact with jihad cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and frequented jihadist websites; may have had business cards proclaiming himself a "SoA" (Soldier of Allah); and may have created and presented an Islamically correct PowerPoint brief outlining reasons for jihad by Muslims within the U.S. Armed Forces, but no matter. His actions remain a total mystery to the U.S. Army.

To wit: "Although we may never know why it happened, we do know that heroic actions took place that day," Brig. Gen. Joseph DiSalvo said in presenting the Secretary of the Army Award for Valor to Joleen Cahill, widow of Michael Grant Cahill. Cahill is recognized as the first person to have tried to stop Hasan and the only civilian to have been killed by Hasan that day. "He will forever be a source of inspiration."

Here is an update on the trial of a US soldier diagnosed by the US military as suffering from PTSD and schizophrenia whom the US military nonetheless put on trial for murdering a Taliban commander in US custody. New details below include some of the factors that just might have contributed to his battle stress -- seven fellow soldiers who were killed around him, including his chaplain.

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - The fate of an Indiana soldier accused of murdering a Taliban commander in U.S. custody has been decided in a plea deal with the U.S. Army.

Army Pfc. David Lawrence of Lawrenceburg, Indiana will be sentenced to 12 ½ years with a minimum of ten years at Leavenworth. He could be eligible for parole in four years. The deal was just reached with the judge at Fort Carson, Colorado this afternoon.

I-Team 8 launched an investigation into case after Lawrence was diagnosed with PTSD...

Pfc. David Lawrence shot and killed a Taliban commander shackled in a US prison cell in Afghanistan in October 2010. Army-appointed psychiatrists determined Lawrence

suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia and therefore lacked the mental capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions.

Still, Lawrence was charged with premeditated murder in the Oct. 17 slaying of Mullah Mohebullah.... The shooting happened shortly after Lawrence was returned to his unit following a visit he requested to a combat stress clinic.

Despite the diagnosis, the US Army scheduled a court-martial on a murder charge. This morning, right about now, Lawrence is expected to plead guilty in a deal that will lead to a shortened prison sentence. In other words, instead of life in prison or the death penalty, he'll get a mere 15 or 20 years, I'm guessing. [Update: He was sentenced to 12 1/2 years.]Meanwhile, of course,...

"The trial," of course, is that of Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders for offending and inciting hatred of Muslims through factual discussions and warnings about Islamic jihad and Islamization. And on it must go, the Dutch authorities have ruled, despite gross examples of bias and even apparent witness-tampering. Expert witness Hans Jansen sent a statement on the trial to Jihadwatch, which concludes with the following prediction:

The trial, hence, goes on where it got derailed in the fall of 2010. From now on, someone who speaks in the Netherlands about Islamic theology, law or religious practice will have to be extremely careful. Librarians will have to clean their shelves: books from whatever period may have to be removed. Tourists who bring books or newspapers with them from the outside world must hope for the best. Publishers and bookshops will surely spontaneously understand their patriotic duties. The multicultural state shall have its way.

It goes without saying that Christianity, Judaism and Atheism cannot receive similar protection from the multicultural state – because if that were the case, the Koran and all handbooks of Mohammedan law would have to be forbidden because of the offensive and abusive language these religious texts employ when discussing non-Muslim religious viewpoints. And, as we all know, to forbid Islamic books would be a very unmulticultural thing to do indeed.

The Army honored a fallen hero of the Ft. Hood Jihad Massacre with a medal yesterday. Not that the Army describes or even permits itself to understand the attack of November 5, 2009 that way. Maj. Nidal Hasan may have shouted "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is great) as he fired, killing thirteen and wounding more than two dozen, may have been in touch with jihad cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and frequented jihadist websites, had business cards printed proclaiming himself to be a "SoA (SWT)" or "Soldier of Allah (Glory to Allah)," created and presented a full and frank brief for jihad by Muslims within the US Armed Services, but his action remains to this day a Total Mystery to the Army.

To wit:

"Although we may never know why it happened, we do know that heroic actions took place that day," Brig. Gen. Joseph DiSalvo said at the ceremony Monday afternoon in presenting the Secretary of the Army Award for Valor to Joleen Cahill, his widow. "He will forever be a source of inspiration."

With those words, the general stripped away all context from 62-year-old civilian Michael Grant Cahill's valorous act of charging Hasan with a chair as Hasan fired on the crowd, during which Cahill was himself slain. In honoring Cahill's courage, the general balked at its significance in Islam's war on the West. This omission takes nothing away from Cahill and his courageous, bold response to the horrific assault. It does, however, wrongly release the nation from its debt to him. In treating Hasan's rampage as no more purposeful than a flood or a cougar attack, the general renders Cahill's ultimate sacrifice to the most personal level; exemplary, admirable, but of no further consequence beyond the scene, outside the circle. This is morally wrong. It was the general's duty to place Cahill's death in perspective, to impress upon the rest of us that he died not only for his fellows, but in defense of our liberty, which is under jihad attack.

One feature that marks a totalitarian regime is media that serve as the government's information service. TASS, Radio Berlin, Voice of Hanoi -- these were all government entities that conveyed what the dictatorship wanted. The handout comes, the handout is published. The real danger point arrives when propaganda no longer rankles, but flows naturally. That's when authority carries more weight than evidence, and peer pressure suppresses independent thinking. It's also when captives become subjects.

Watching our free, First-Amendment-protected media react to the surprising release of President Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate, I have to wonder: What exactly is the difference? I exaggerate, but not much. It's been three weeks since Obama first made his long-form birth certificate public on April 27, 2011. Why, suddenly, did he do this, and not in 2008, 2009 or 2010 when this first of the missing bona fides became a focal point of deep national consternation?...

Today is Michael Behenna's 28th birthday, his third birthday beind bars in prison at Ft. Leavenworth where he is serving a 15-year sentence for killing a known terrorist in self-defense in Iraq.

This is a national shame.

His parents Scott and Vicki Behenna write:

Though his spirits remain high, life in prison takes its toll on even the strongest of men and that includes our Michael who waits patiently for a decision on his appeal.
The truth is we really don’t know when such a decision will be handed down. Michael's appeal was filed in December 2009, the government responded in July 2010, and the argument before the Army Court of Appeals occurred in December 2010. We have heard nothing since. Michael's remarkable attitude remains upbeat...

Drudge, correctly, is trumpeting the White House shut out of the Boston Herald from pool coverage of a Boston fundraiser the President is attending today because the tabloid ran an op-ed by Mitch Romney on its front page ON MARCH 8, the date of Obama's last visi to Boston.

Not that the date affects the ugly level of media manipulation on display here; but it does add a touch of the maniacal to this childish but sinister display of White House muscle. "This is taking the control freak thing to new levels," the Herald's Joe Battenfeld wrote.

Strangely, the date of the Romney op-ed didn't make it into the lead of the Herald account:

The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails...

Meanwhile, American officials have been in and out of Iraq begging Maliki, pretty please, to let our roughly 47,000 troops stay on past the December 31 deadline, along with those roughly 60,000 US civilian contractors.

WHY?

There are two groups pushing to stay. One group is the Obama administration, which wants to stay not for "empire," as some say, but for re-election.

How would/will it look while Obama and his teleprompter are out on the hustings in 2012 when, say, the Iranian mullahs make Karbala their summer White House, Hezbollah opens headquarters in Sadr City, and the Revolutionary Guard starts an amusement park in downtown Baghdad called...

April 2011 AP Photo: Afghan Local Police, and villagers listen to a speech during a ceremony presenting new uniforms for ALP officers at Gizab village of Uruzgan province south west of Kabul, Afghanistan.

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On March 15, 2011, Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee about an "important new addition to the overall campaign" in Afghanistan -- the Afghan Local Police Initative (ALP). This week, Oxfam issued a report damning the program for gross abuses including child sexual abuse (including the pedophiliac pratice of "dancing boys"),...

Not to ruin your weekend with ugly pics or anything, but John Rosenthal is onto something troublesome regarding those bin Laden death pics, which we, the people, are not allowed to see, while our representatives, it seems, are now able to view if they truck themselves over to CIA headquarters. Why CIA HQ, and not, say, Congress itself, or the National Archives or anywhere else a little less associated with hush-hush tradecraft and black ops?

Anyway, as John reported a couple of days ago at Big Peace, last weekend, the Pentagon released soundless video "outtakes" purportedly of bin Laden that administration sources say were scooped up in the recent raid in Abbotabad and which they date to 2010 at the earliest, but which John has matched to a 2007 video "widely dismissed as fake."

KABUL -- Two international service members were killed in a shootout at an Afghan police compound, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said Friday.

The two who died were part of a mentoring team that was preparing to eat lunch with Afghan police at a compound in southern Helmand province Thursday. A uniformed policeman opened fire at the ISAF troops. The gunman was seriously injured in the incident, ISAF said.

"While this is a serious incident, the actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners," said U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. James B. Laster of ISAF. "We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here."....

The poppy harvest in A-stan is in; is it time for Thanksgiving? Nah. It's IED-increase-time. As USA Today reports: "Pentagon expexts IED hits to rise"

From the story:

"We're at the front edge of the fighting season," said Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, who leads the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). "The poppy harvest has been a little delayed this year. … The overall number of IED incidents will increase. As we know, we can safely say that."

Ironic adverb. We can "safely" say "IED incidents" will increase -- "incidents" that occur mainly because troops are under orders to walk the IED-laced roads and by-ways of Afghanistan. As the story reports:

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are the No.1 cause of fatalities and injuries to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The devices have killed 657 U.S. troops and wounded 6,330 since the war began in 2001 through March of this year. Warmer weather and the end of the poppy harvest have generally heralded the beginning of the toughest combat in Afghanistan.

When (if) future historians look back to early 21st-century America, they should examine two cultural controversies of May 2011 for a quick read on Establishment sensibilities. One involves the bestowal, revocation and re-bestowal of an honorary degree on playwright Tony Kushner by CUNY, and one involves the invitation to Common, a rapper, to perform at a White House poetry reading.

Both controversies set the boundaries of Establishment-acceptable thought -- the span of "settled" debate, and the "correct" set of elite opinions -- and maybe, just maybe reveal one tiny chink.

In the Kushner case, the controversy centered on the objections of CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld to bestowing an honorary degree on Kushner due to the playwright's very public, very vocal opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian Authority (PA). For about five minutes, Wiesenfeld actually persuaded fellow board members to withdraw the Kushner honor (Kushner's 16th honorary degree). But soon after, Wiesenfeld, a son of Holocaust survivors, found himself pilloried in the media, called on to resign from the CUNY board, all for having argued the Establishment-incorrect case -- a case, remember, that was then put to two board votes (the second to get the "correct" outcome). With everything "set right," why the vengeful rage at Wiesenfeld?

In the small newspapers and TV stations around the country, in what are known as "local interest" stories, the national scandal of Afghanistan is being documented, article by article, segment by segment. These are the stories of our returning heroes, our returning wounded, whose fight with and for life, maybe with one limb, maybe without any limbs, is just beginning. What these stories, taken together, demonstrate is one particularly egregious aspect of the flagrant abuse the nation's leaders are subjecting the military to in pursuit of the Bush-Obama Afghanistan "nation-building" fantasy -- something Congress, irresponsibly, doesn't even seem interested in debating.

But here's a possible point of Congressional departure: The Marines 3rd Battalion/3rd Regiment,...

We are currently forced, subject-nation-style, to take it on authority, literally. that Osama bin Laden is dead (no body, no pics, no proof). The White House says it is so, and we, American minions, must agree. We don't even get a lousy pdf of a photo, a la the great and weird, unexamined and unseen "birth certificate."

Now, we are supposed to conclude that this death of the face (figurehead?) of "al Qaeda" -- the leading, but hardly unique jihad brand -- is a transformative moment, either as reason to leave Afghanistan (I'll take it), or reason to fight there even longer. Or reason for President Obama to lay out a "new" Mideast strategy. Such claims could only be made by those who are determined to ignore or cover up the animating role of Islam itself in Islamic terrorism, whether "affiliated," as they say, with al Qaeda (secret handshake? decoder rings?), or unafilliated...

Daniel Pipes has an excellent piece today at Big Peace focusing on the Iranization of Iraq -- long, long a subject of great interest to me.

Pipes cites the recent massacre of Iranian dissidents (MeK) in Iraq by Iraqi regulars which took place one day after MeK released evidence of Iran's growing capacity to enrich uranium, and during the recent visit to Iraq by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Pipes continues:

On April 11, the advisor for military affairs to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i (according to a news report) “praised the Iraqi Army for its recent attack on the strongholds of [the MeK] and asked Baghdad to continue attacking the terrorist base until its destruction.”

On April 24, despite United Nations insistence that “Camp Ashraf residents be protected from forcible deportation, expulsion...

Stirrings of life on Capitol Hill: Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has introduced a bill to stop distribution of $3 billion in aid that Congress appropriated for Pakistan this year until the State Department certifies that Pakistan was not harboring Osama bin Laden.

Unless it were to serve as a rubber stamp, such a bill could be a step toward long overdue accountability on Pakistan. It at least offers a way to call out the pathological inertia that drives the U.S.-Pakistani relationship not forward, but in circles, causing dizzy policy-making. Even after Pakistan appears to have been caught in flagrante delicto with Public Enemy No. 1, House Speaker John Boehner, for example, was still prattling on about Pakistan being "critical to breaking the back of al-Qaida." Like the battered spouse who can't see what's wrong with another shiner, Boehner insisted: "This is not a time to back...

KABUL -- The Afghan Taliban have created a special unit to avenge the killing of Al-Qaeda's leader by US special forces in Pakistan on Monday, a commander in eastern Afghanistan has told Al-Jazeera. "We have created a special unit to avenge the martyr Sheikh Osama Bin Laden," Dawran Safi told the Qatar-based Arabic satellite TV channel. We will take forward his standard and wage war against foreigners and their agents," Safi said in an interview from the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Sarah Palin has changed foreign policy course. She has traded in the neoconservative bent she entered national politics with, which envisions an apparently unlimited global role for a nation-building United States, for an outlook emphasizing national interest as the criterion for embarking on military adventures. This shift manifested itself in a recently reported change of advisors, from a team composed of Randy Scheunemann and Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, to the Hoover Institution's Peter Schweizer. (NB: Schweizer edits Breitbart's BigPeace.com, where work of mine appears.) It also may foreshadow what I expect will become -- what I hope will become -- a long overdue debate within the Republican Party as conservatives grow weary (again, I hope) of reckless and feckless power projections into the Islamic world that win us nothing, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Libya.

It is early yet in Palin's post-neocon assessment of the world (here is her first policy address),...

After I watched this ABC report on the secrets which the hulk of the helicopter wrecked and left behind during the bin Laden raid have revealed, I couldn't stop thinking about the situation. Because of the crash, the world now knows that the US is using a brand new, once completely secret stealth helicopter technology. The report shows the hulk, shows children gathering pieces of its special fabric in the grass outside the bin Laden compound, and hints darkly that those same pieces may well be now en route to China, which has close ties to Pakistan's military. It then shows Pakistani officials driving off the remnants of the helicopter to some unknown and, the presumption is, beyond-our-reach location.

I've had a sneaking suspicion that the Obama White House would ultimately nix the release of Dead Bin Laden, and here it comes, the prepatory rumblings: Gates and Hillary, ABC's Jake Tapper reports (via Drudge) are arguing against release. This tagteam pushback, Tapper writes with soothing gentility, is due to "concerns at the Pentagon and State Department that releasing a photograph could prompt a backlash against the US for killing bin Laden where one does not seem to currently exist."

Hmm. Now where would that be? Manhattan? Madrid? Bali? Tel Aviv? Nah. We're talking Umma Central. Our leadership is quaking in their boots (pumps) over the prospect that the sight of dead Bin Laden would set off billions of Hair-Trigger Moderates...

It never rains but it pours. No sooner had Geert Wilders made his final appeal for the continued existence of free speech in the Netherlands, my good friend and colleague Lars Hedegaard, journalist, author, president of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Society, was declared guilty by a Danish court of violating a deeply pernicious point of the nation's penal code known as 266b. Specifically, Lars was convicted of "[issuing] a pronouncement or other communication by which a group of persons are threatened, insulted or denigrated due to their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation." That he committed this "crime" in the privacy of his own home during a Christmas Day luncheon conversation is an extra icicle on this completely chilling verdict.

Unbeknownst to Hedegaard and without his permission, his remarks, which concerned the incidence of family rape in Islam, were recorded and later uploaded to the Internet. This saved him from a guilty...

... Geert Wilders made his final statement in court yesterday where he is still on trial for telling the truth about Islam. This, as often noted, is a judicial outrage, a public nightmare, and an existential threat to liberty as we have known it which doesn't end because bin Laden is dead. There is a raw, ugly fear of Islam in the non-Islamic world, and the grotesque reflex of the frightened power classes is to side with the raw, ugly power of Islam, which, never let it be forgotten, is derived solely from their own fear. The results are to be seen in the travesties around us from the Netherlands' campaign to silence, penalize and make an example of the courageous Wilders, to the USA's grotesque staging of a dignified, Islamically correct "funeral at sea" for a mass murderer whose corpse should have been disposed of as the human trash that it was.

Maybe a helicopter like this one brought bin Laden's corpse to the USS Carl Vinson late last night where in the wee hours of Monday morning the bullet-pocked corpse of the terror-mastermind received full jihad honors. Or was that full Islamic honors? I get them confused. Whatever they were, they were accorded by a thoroughly abased and dhimmified US military, as Andrew Bostom explains here.

AFP reports:

US forces administered Muslim religious rites for Osama bin Laden aboard an aircraft carrier Monday in the Arabian Sea, an American official said after the raid that killed the Al-Qaeda leader.

"Today religious rights were conducted for the deceased on the deck of the USS Carl-Vinson which is located in the North Arabian Sea," a senior defense official said.

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed. The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag.

Early in 2009, I interviewed Gen. Paul Vallely (US Army Ret.) and learned about the "lily pad" strategy -- a strategy, Vallely explained, that relies on "the maximum use of unconventional forces," such as Navy SEALS and other special forces, who can be deployed as needed from outposts in friendly countries (Israel, India, Philippines, Italy, etc.), or from U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups (as in this well-executed 2009 example). Carrier strike groups, by the way, generally include eight to 10 vessels "with more fire power," the general noted, "than most nations."

The turd was killed in a mansion located in a "densely populated" area called Abbottabad, 30 miles outside Islamabad -- not in that dark, wet cave in the North West Territories where, it was often imagined, his only luxury would have been a dialysis machine plugged into a generator. No, the jihad kingpin was living a good life in what passes for civilization in Pakistan. As Dexter Filkins tells us, Abbottabad is home to "a Pakistani military base, a military academy, and many retired Pakistani officers."

Is it even remotely possible everyone in town knew nothing? And have I mentioned (lately) that the motto of the Pakistani Army is "Faith in Allah, fear of Allah, and jihad in the path of Allah"?

While Pakistan supports the Taliban in its IED war on American troops, the US has, unconscionably, remained "partners" with the nuclear-armed sharia state due to its supposed...

Even before the carnage inside Kabul airport was sorted and identified, before the squads of sober officers were deployed to inform stateside next of kin, and before the caskets were filled, closed, and draped with flags for the final flight home, this much we knew: Another Afghan Muslim "partner" in uniform -- a veteran Air Force pilot -- had opened fire on NATO trainers in a meeting, killing eight U.S. military personnel and an American contractor.

Question: Will our U.S. representatives -- and those of the deceased -- pay attention to this latest Afghan attack on Americans? If so, will they a) yawn; b) cluck; c) raise hell; d) none of the above?

The fact is, these murders are not "just one of those things" -- the unfortunate outcome of a "disagreement," or even "financial pressures" as mentioned, straight-faced, in early reports. These ritualistic murders of Westerners, like similar assaults before them, are the most shocking manifestations of our foundationally flawed policy of nation-building in the Islamic world. They are some of the flesh-and-blood sacrifices to the make-believe "Democracy Project," whose postmodern-day missionaries believe must be advanced on the backs of the U.S. military according to the quasi-holy doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN).

Jim Lacey is a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College.

Good. Judging by his recent piece at NRO, he has common sense, the basis of any successful strategy. Lacey went to Afghanistan recently, and didn't fall for the old "fragile and reversible" routine, as House Speaker Boehner recently did. In fact, Lacey thinks Afghanistan can "swim on its own."

I sat through darn near two hours of Fox News last night, something I rarely do, and heard not one word about the Kabul Airport Massacre that left nine Americans dead yesterday at the hands of an Afghan Air Corps officer. There was, however, a recurring crawl reporting the incident along with the killer's possible motive -- financial pressures. ABC News, meanwhile, ran a deeply disturbing report that the killer disarmed all of the Americans and Afghans in the room priot to killing the Americans, execution-style. Why? Because, as many in the media would spin it, the killer had had to sell his home recently, which is what his alleged brother claimed.

Remember Faizal Shahzad, the Times Square Would-be-bomber of 2010? The media babbled on about the financial pressures, including home foreclosure, that must have surely driven Shahzad's attempted act of jihad, trained and supported by Pakistani Taliban, in heart of midtown Manhattan last spring -- becausewhatelsecoulditbe? Of course, when...

The caption on this EPA photo is: "Afghan Army soldiers secure the military base after a shooting incident." The killer of nine NATO troops and a contractor was an Afghan Air Corps officer. Is the base secure?

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The carnage inside an operations room of the Afghan Air Corps at Kabul airport has yet to be sorted, identified and tallied but this much we know: Another Afghan Muslim "partner" in uniform -- a veteran military pilot according to the AP -- has opened fire on NATO troops in a meeting, killing as many as eight troops and a contractor.

While we await the grim but thoroughly predictable details -- the exemplary lives of the personnel murdered while "partnering" with our Afghan "allies"; the shooter who for reasons "unknown" to ISAF earned his place in Islamic paradise through this "holiest" act of jihad against infidels...

My friend John Work, an occasional contributor at this site before he started his own blog at Here's the Right Side of It, sent me his alarming report about Youtube pulling the account of Vlad Tepes, a primo website of the counter-jihad, purportedly over an old copyright issue but quite possibly under pressure stemming from a fatwa. Details here.

Part of the attraction of Vlad Tepes is the blog's selection of video footage from around the world that captures the approaching, encroaching, invading and entrenching migration of Islam into the West -- something our sorry excuse for Big Media and also Conservative Media (read Fox) refuse to report.

There is something fishy about the fact that the US government unclassified good intelligence attesting to the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq back in 2007 but made the rest of us wait for it forever -- or until Wikileaks came along to release the information in 2011. Luckily, Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard noticed as it went by. His report opens:

A former Guantanamo detainee “was identified as an Iraqi intelligence officer who relocated to Afghanistan (AF) in 1998 where he served as a senior Taliban Intelligence Directorate officer in Mazar-E-Sharif,” according to a recently leaked assessment written by American intelligence analysts. The former detainee, an Iraqi named Jawad Jabber Sadkhan, “admittedly forged official documents and reportedly provided liaison between the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Forget Sun Tzu and von Clauswitz. With tea-meister Mortenson unmasked, US military strategists are now turning to Lewis Carroll for tips on moving effortlessly from war to war, from mess to mess, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya without missing a sip. See if the following excerpt isn't US policy in a Mad Hatter's tea cup:

`I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: `let's all move one place on.'

He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: and Alice was a good...

I have struck up some mighty fine e-meetings of the mind through my column over the years; none more appreciated than my military penpals. After last week's musings and column on the spectacular unravelling of Greg Mortenson, Pentagon "Three Cups" guru-sage, I received the following email from Paul Avallone, who served in Special Forces in Afghanistan (Nangarhar) in 2002-2003, later returning as a photo-journalist in 2006 and 2008. Along the way, I have published some of Paul's work, notably his you-are-there...

Writing at The Corner, Nina Shea recaps the latest in the saga of Terry Jones, who has been trying to take a peaceful, non-flammable protest of sharia and jihad to the sidewalk outside the largest mosque in America in Dearborn, Michigan only to be outlawed by the Michigan District Court. Like all other envelop-pushing cases, this latest incident serves as a stress test of the rule of law in our society. And, like most other such envelop-pushing cases, it proves that the rule of law is strong -- only the law that is strong is sharia (Islamic) law.

The Michigan District Court's egregious ruling against Jones is all about protecting Islam from criticism, rather than about protecting criticism from Islam, which is what US jurisprudence, not to mention the American Way, demands. It is sharia that the US court is enforcing.

One particularly hideous aspect of the ruling bars Pastor Jones and his colleague Assistant Pastor Wayne Sapp from visiting the vicinity of this mosque for the next three years. Jones and Sapp are American citizens; the area the court has barred to them is in American territory. With this ruling, the judge has made the court both the creator and also the enforcer of what amounts to a public, criticism-free and protest-free zone for Islam, a place in USA where "blasphemy" against Islam is against the law.

This (above) is "postcard" from Afghanistan by Paul Avallone, someone who has drunk more than his share of cups of tea there. first as a Green Beret and later as a photojournalist. Readers will recall his pungently evocative writings and photos from his "Flirting with Afghanistan" series published here in 2010.

It is a most fitting image to illustrate my syndicated column this week on "Three Cups of Tea."

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"Why Did the Pentagon Listen to Greg Mortenson?"

To say that the memoir "Three Cups of Tea" is the basis of the bitter pill that is American counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is a falsehood and gross exaggeration -- like much of the book itself, as it...

I don't know which is more outrageous: the State Department memo claiming that the Libyan "rebels" -- sorry, their "political arm" -- has "embraced the Geneva Conventions" (death grip?), or that Uncle Sucker (you) will be catering their halal meals (via Andrew Bostom).

As you read John Rosenthal's important and harrowing compilation of "rebel" atrocities, all uploaded to Youtube in the high-tech-jihadi tradition, see for yourself what the rebs have embraced right there in the open in the main square of the "rebel" capital of Benghazi.

After gag-recovery, do ask your Congressman just why it is the US has now decided to pay out precious taxpayer dollars ($25 million in "non-lethal aid") to cook for and cater to, in every sense of the word, such savages. And why isn't the MSM or Fox covering this story of now considerable American interest? What Rosenthal has found should be front and center in the media so Americans can actually evaluate the decisions being made in our name, and make informed decisions about the use of our money and military in the future. But it's not. Why not?

Best-selling writer Jon Krakauer has published his own 75-page expose, Three Cups of Deceit (download here), which includes an account of how he, Krakauer, was taken to the cleaners as a donor to Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson's institute, CAI, even before he realized the Mortenson myth was extensively fabricated, which Krakhauer also details in shocking detail.

Of course, we've seen fabricated memoirs before. But Mortenson's takes the cake for both its use as charity bait for schoolchildren and bona fides for Mortenson's role as an unofficial advisor of Pentagon COINdinistas.

Now, the book's publisher is "reviewing" the book's content, and the Attorney General of Montana is opening an inquiry into Mortenson's charity CAI.

Maybe it was that comment quoted by Krakauer from a former treasurer of the CAI board who said that Mortenson regarded CAI as his personal ATM....

For some years now, there have been a few voices sounding the alarm on "Muslim outreach" -- the intensive engagement the US government entered into post 9/11 with a rogue's gallery of Imam Flim Flams and Muslim taqiyya artists that has subverted our nation's response to jihad, violent and stealthy, to spread the rule of Islam.

One of the most salient voices sounding this alarm has been that of Stephen Coughlin, now a Team B II colleague, who, as the senior military staff's sole expert on Islamic threat doctrine (jihad), was unceremoniously dropped by the Pentagon back in 2008 when his now-famous jihad brief came to the attention of one Hesham Islam, senior aide to Gordon England, Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration. (More on Coughlin's case and Hesham Islam to be found here.)

One of Coughlin's key insights is that in relying on "Muslim outreach" for our interpretations of jihad and other...

From the AP, news that 60 Minutes may be about to tell us that Greg Mortenson, guru to military brass, is a phony.

Did I say "phony"? Big fat phony is more like it.

I wrote about Mortenson's status as unofficial Pentagon advisor to Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal et al after Mortenson's bestselling book, Three Cups of Tea, became a hit with their wives. Not just a hit. Required reading before anyone deploys to Afghanistan.

To the east, an Afghan Army suicide bomber murdered five NATO soldiers and five Afghans. The Taliban claimed credit.

Update: All five NATO soldiers were Americans from the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

That brings the four-month total of Western forces killed "inside the wire" by their own supposed Afghan allies to 27.

In the south, two separate Taliban IED explosions killed three NATO soldiers. No word on injuries.

Meanwhile, back in Kabul, Hamid Karzai met with Pakistan, almost literally in a symbolic way, to discuss peace talks with the Taliban and other "reconciliation" issues. Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Gilani announced "an upgraded Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission comprising of top-ranking officials...to accelerate and promote a peace process."

Reading about another catastrophically maimed casualty of the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) in Afghanistan, I was struck by a biographical note. This young American, now a triple amputee after stepping on an IED while on foot patrol, an integral feature of COIN's hearts-and-minds efforts, was only 11 years old when the war in Afghanistan began.

Come October, this war will have lasted a decade. Last month, the Iraq War passed the eight-year mark. During the Vietnam War, the question was whether there was any "light at the end of the tunnel." In these wars, we have to wonder whether there is any tunnel. If so, no one seems to be in any hurry to get out.

Why? Why is it that we have come to accept war without end -- not to mention, I would (and do) argue, war without benefit? And why does it actually seem as though our leaders want it this way?

There are reasons and they are shocking.

Watching Defense Secretary Gates in Iraq recently where he practically begged to leave U.S. forces in place after the scheduled pullout in December 2011, Jed Babbin, I think, nailed it. Writing in the American Spectator, Babbin guessed that President Obama just doesn't want Iraq to fall apart, at least not on the eve of the 2012 election. Ditto Afghanistan. And falling apart -- I would call it reverting to type -- is the inevitable result of U.S. withdrawal. "Who lost Iraq and Afghanistan?" is not a question Obama wants to get into during the election. Thus, Obama will slog on with COIN, maintaining his weirdly logical wartime alliance with the neoconservative, democracy-project Right. On Obama's part, this is a political calculation, pure and simple. On the Right, something else is going on.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood website is reporting that a delegation from the British Foreign Office visited the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Alexandria. According to the report:

A delegation from the British Foreign Office, headed by Consul General Marie-Louise Archer, on Thursday visited the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s administrative office in Alexandria. The delegation held the meeting in the presence of former MB Parliamentary Bloc Spokesperson Hamdy Hasan, group members and head of the MB administrative office Hussein Ibrahim.

‘The meeting was attended by the Relations Coordinator for the UK foreign Office Martin Hetringen,’ Archer said, adding that the meeting comes...

Recon Marine Cpl. Todd Love (above) got a hero's welcome in his hometown of Acworth, Georgia this week. Love lost both legs and his left arm in an IED explosion in Afghanistan a few months ago. The Washington Examiner story below by Sara Carter tells us that even if US forces had photographed the bomber in the act and captured him with bomb traces on his hands, they would then have had to feed him, clothe him ... and let him go.

This is another Afghanistan scandal that should get Congress pounding tables and demanding answers from the Pentagon and the White House. It should get readers doing the same. After all, we pay $350 million a day for this.

My dear friends Gina and Michael Pack see their long-in-the-works documentary "Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton," written by the excellent historian Richard Brookhiser, debut tonight on PBS at 10pm (check, as they say, local listings to be sure of the time slot).

This is no common documentary. Not only is the subject one of the most exceptional men America can claim as her own, but the consistently creative and energetic skills the filmmakers use to bring this overlooked if not almost neglected Founder into modern-day, all-too-empty consciousness make for some extremely memorable, non-Ken-Burnsian dramatic sequences. Some work better than others to bring our Hamilton back to extraordinary life -- for example, his out-of-the-blue emergence from flyspeck Carribean islands where he was born a bastard and then orphaned is vividly depicted on location in St Croix and Nevis; the...

Back in April 2009, I wrote a column, based around an interview with Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (Ret.), called "Let Afghanistan Go." Almost two years later to the day, here, once more with feeling, is this week's column:

Two more American soldiers were killed this week by a "lone" Afghan "ally." These latest murders took place inside a compound in the northern Afghan province of Faryab where the soldiers were providing security for a meeting between U.S. trainers and Afghan border police.

I can't find more details, not even the soldiers' names, but let's use our imagination. Two presumably young soldiers arrived safely with their team at the Afghan border police compound near the Afghan border with Turkmenistan. They probably thought the first hard part of the day was over, that they were behind a secure perimeter and could have a smoke or a chew or a stick of gum and wait until they had to mount up and face the booby-traps and sniper harassment that would follow them home. It was at this point that their killer, an Afghan police officer, moved in on them. Maybe he was even assigned to "partner" with them. He greeted them, offered something to eat, might even have told them a joke, who knows? While they were eating, smoking, laughing, somehow off guard, he shot them dead.

I write about David Petraeus now and then -- ok, considering him a primary architect and implementer of the Arabist-tilted policy (long denied on the Right) of endless armed social work (Great Society Goes to War) masquerading as national security strategy that is leading (has led) to our national suicide, I write about him quite a lot -- but who needs words with a picture like this?